The Boston Globe (the paper version) yesterday printed pornographic pictures allegedly showing US forces raping Iraqi women. These pictures have been known for some time to be fake, and indeed come from porn sites with a non-consensual sex theme. There the pictures were picked up by various Islamist propaganda sites, and now they are being propagated by anti-war activists in the US.
Of course I wish I had blogged about these pictures (at least I am pretty sure they are the same) when I first encountered them on a message board several months ago, posted by a rather confused anti-American. I immediately could see they were porn pictures (eg. the makeup, one pictured given female name after model, etc) and said so. They were hosted on a site where all the text was in Arab, which essentially meant I could not write meaningfully about it without posting links to the pictures, which I definately didn't want to do.
Dahlia Lithwick has found out that US immigration is busy harassing foreign journalists and tourists instead of trying to protect their country against terrorists.
So next time you read that an alleged foreigner have violated immigration rules, you should know it is - by design - impossible to know about and satisfy all those arcane rules. They can throw foreigners out for any and no good reason. Not infrequently, they do when they shouldn't, and sometimes they don't when they should:
The INS sent Mohammed Atta's student-visa approval six months after he crashed a plane into the World Trade Center. We need to start differentiating between targeting real terrorists and terrorizing random targets.
No kidding!
Update: ...but see contrary opinion in my comments.
The Misconceptions about the Iraq war entry contains some data already. I am sure Dean and the others will add more and heavier articles soon, Hopefully I will have time to add some stuff, too.
With a bit of good effort, this can become a great online resource for war bloggers and others. If you have something to contribute, check it out!
Massive traffic knocked terrorist site off the net
Massive interest in the terrorist beheading video forced the provider hosting the Islamist website to take it down.
The Malaysian server for the site said it took action after the huge numbers of people trying to view the video overloaded its systems.
The company said it had been unaware of the site's contents, but would have acted sooner if it had known.
The graphic images of 26-year-old Nicholas Berg's death prompted shock and outrage the world over.
They also prompted thousands upon thousands of people to log on to the internet so they could see for themselves the entire event in all its horror.
The video was stored on a computer server belonging to a Malaysian web hosting company, Acme Commerce Sendirian Berhad.
The server had been leased to the creators of the site, Al-ansar.biz. They first put the film on the net, and are thought to have links to al-Qaeda.
Tell me about it. By a coincidence, more or less, this site came up very prominently on most search engines when people first started searching for the title of the video, and all my previous traffic records were shattered.
Anybody contacted the registrant? If he exists, that is.
Update:Internet Haganah had this site and registration details on its list of Islamofascist hate-sites already. The provider's professed ignorance is not too impressive.
Update 2: Two of manygoogle-cached pages on the extremist page contains the above email address. Alas, my Arab is a bit rusty.
I haven't been looking too much around, but it appears very impressive indeed.
Usenet may be a well guarded secret for people who joined the net over the last few years. Most people who are active on Usenet are probably happy that this is the case. Even if you have no intention of being active on Usenet, it is still worth knowing about. If a normal web search for solutions to technical problems fails to help, a Usenet (groups) search typically provides much more depth.
So what's really new with Google news? It allows tracking which threads/discussions you want to follow. You can have news sent to you by email, based on search/thread criteria. Also, Google integrates Usenet news with a new Google email based news in a seemless interface, allowing you to create your own mailing lists. The best part: All those messages/emails will be searchable!
Google Groups provides in improved interface to Usenet news, and also an obvious competitor to Yahoo Groups.
The ghastly terrorist video called "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American," or rather a pointer to it, can be found here. Or just scroll down...
